Dani Shapiro Books In Order

Playing with Fire

Two women Lucy, daughter of a traditional Jewish family, and Carolyn, wealthy and reckless come to share a rare love together, until Lucy succumbs to the charms of Carolyn’s stepfather. NYT.

Fugitive Blue

The toast of New York’s art scene, Georgia Higgins Hirsch regrets leaving her husband and daughter, Janet herself a struggling actress in the same city to pursue her dreams.National

Picturing the Wreck

Thirty years after his family and career are destroyed by an affair with one of his patients, psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Solomon Grossman finds a chance for redemption when he discovers where his grown son is working. Tour.

Family History

From the author of the best selling memoir Slow Motion Chilling…
her vision is unblinking New York Times Book Review; Riveting…
a breathtaking combination of candor and bravado San Francisco Chronicle, a ferociously paced new novel about a woman losing control of her life, her marriage, and her kids, and discovering that you can do everything right and still find the world you ve made slipping away. Rachel Jensen has it all: a husband she adores, challenging work in art restoration, a terrific teenage daughter, and a new baby on the way. Then her infant son is injured in an accident in her daughter’s arms, and that accident begets a terrifying lie. Set in a small Massachusetts town, Family History is about a family spiraling toward disintegration, the terrible force of guilt in children, and a mother s nightmarish realization that she cannot protect her own child. As the life the Jensens have so carefully built begins its slow collapse, we see with excruciating clarity the frailty of our strongest allegiances and the precarious ledge upon which our most vital relations marriage, parenthood are balanced. Family History blazes through this intimate and highly charged territory with stunning velocity, and marks a bold new step forward for the prodigiously gifted Dani Shapiro.

Black & White

From the author of Family History Poised, absorbing…
a bona fide page turner The New York Times Book Review and the best selling memoir Slow Motion, a spellbinding novel about art, fame, ambition, and family that explores a provocative question: Is it possible for a mother to be true to herself and true to her children at the same time?

Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to fourteen. The Clara Series, which graced the walls of museums around the world as well as the pages of New York City tabloids that labeled the work po*rnographic, cast a long and inescapable shadow over its subject. At eighteen, when Clara might have entered university and begun to shape an identity beyond her sensationalized, unsought role in the New York art world, she fled to the quiet obscurity of small town Maine, where she married and had a child, a daughter whom she has tried to shield from the central facts of her early life and her damaging role as her mother’s muse.

Fourteen years later, Ruth Dunne is dying, and Clara is summoned to her bedside. Despite her anguish and ambivalence about confronting a family life she has repressed and denied for more than a decade, Clara returns. She finds Ruth surrounded, even in her illness, by worshipful interns, protective assistants, and her conniving art dealer.

Once again, she is Clara Dunne, the object of curiosity, the girl in the photos. Except this time she has her own daughter to think about a girl who at nine looks strikingly like the girl in Ruth s photos and she yearns to protect her, to insulate her from the exposure that will inevitably result when her two worlds, New York and Maine, collide.

As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro s novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart. A brilliant examination of motherhood a novel that pits artistic inspiration against maternal obligation and asks whether the two can ever be fully reconciled Black & White explores the limits and duties of family loyalties, and even of love. Gripping, haunting, psychologically complex, this is Shapiro at her captivating best.

Slow Motion

Dani Shapiro, a young woman from a deeply religious home, became the girlfriend of a famous and flamboyant married attorney her best friend’s stepfather. The moment Lenny Klein entered her life, everything changed: she dropped out of college, began drinking, and neglected her friends and family. But then came a phone call an accident on a snowy road had left her parents critically injured. Forced to reconsider her life, Shapiro learned to re enter the world she had left. Telling of a life nearly ruined by the gift of beauty, and then saved through tragedy, Shapiro’s memoir is a beautiful account of how a life gone terribly wrong can be rescued through tragedy.

Devotion

In her midforties and settled into the responsibilities and routines of adulthood, Dani Shapiro found herself with more questions than answers. Was this all life was a hodgepodge of errands, dinner dates, e mails, meetings, to do lists? What did it all mean? Having grown up in a deeply religious and traditional family, Shapiro had no personal sense of faith, despite repeated attempts to create a connection to something greater. Feeling as if she was plunging headlong into what Carl Jung termed ‘the afternoon of life,’ she wrestled with self doubt and a searing disquietude that would awaken her in the middle of the night. Set adrift by loss her father’s early death; the life threatening illness of her infant son; her troubled relationship with her mother she had become edgy and uncertain. At the heart of this anxiety, she realized, was a challenge: What did she believe? Spurred on by the big questions her young son began to raise, Shapiro embarked upon a surprisingly joyful quest to find meaning in a constantly changing world. The result is Devotion: a literary excavation to the core of a life. In this spiritual detective story, Shapiro explores the varieties of experience she has pursued from the rituals of her black hat Orthodox Jewish relatives to yoga shalas and meditation retreats. A reckoning of the choices she has made and the knowledge she has gained, Devotion is the story of a woman whose search for meaning ultimately leads her home. Her journey is at once poignant and funny, intensely personal and completely universal.

After

As the ‘Leave it To Beaver ‘ model for American parenting fades into distant memory, the June and/or Ward Cleaver of today face challenges and obstacles far more diverse and acute than the high jinx of Beaver and his neighborhood pals. In this original and timely collection of short stories focused on contemporary parenting, editors Heather Swain and Emily Franklin have selected stories that address the timeless certainties and uncharted territories that define parenting in the 21st century. In styles ranging from the realist to the surreal, and subjects ranging from bringing home a new infant to dealing with an adolescent’s burgeoning sexuality, After covers the whole gambit of feeling and experience faced by parents in today s world. The follow up to Before, and the second volume of the anthology of pregnancy and parenting series that ‘has moms and dads abuzz ‘ Child Magazine, After includes stories from our hottest new fiction writers, including Dani Shapiro, Elizabeth Crane, Tom Perotta, and Amy Bloom. Tender, edgy, anxious and hopeful and sometimes all of those things at once After is a necessary and vital addition to the library of every mom or dad who knows that raising children takes more than a sit com smile and a spotlessly clean kitchen.